


four quarians who never made it back to the fleet (and one who did)

by openended



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Fleet and Flotilla, Gen, Minor Canonical Character(s), Minor Character Death, Pilgrimage, Quarians, Rites of Passage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 07:22:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9425438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: Pilgrimage is dangerous, and while most quarians come back, some don't. Some for their own reasons, others because they can't.2017 Holiday Harbinger gift for tumblr user carastian-candies





	

**lia’vael nar ulnay**

_This is it_ , she thinks as the volus accuses her, _this is how my pilgrimage ends_. She doesn’t even have enough money to eat anything more than the protein paste handed out by a turian charity, she certainly doesn’t have enough to hire someone to help her out of a C-Sec cell. 

She doesn’t steal. Stealing money, especially from a _bosh’tet_ like this volus, probably doesn’t count as _harming another_ , but she wouldn’t do it anyway. Her mother taught her better than that. No matter how she begs, no matter how much she tries, she cannot make the volus or the C-Sec officer believe her.

Lia’s on the verge of tears when the human steps in, with a quarian and a turian behind her. The switch from despair to relief is too rapid, too sudden, and she’s left completely speechless as the human Spectre dresses down the officer. She’s even more stunned when the quarian speaks up and practically throws the missing credit chit at the volus.

“You left it in a shop,” the quarian says, disdain and barely-contained fury dripping from her voice.

The officer and the volus leave, both chastised, and Lia takes a breath.

She thanks her saviors repeatedly, explains that she’s been eating paste and dreaming of ships, and they all wish her luck and go on their way.

The quarian finds her in the shelter that night, as she stares at her half-eaten bowl of dextro protein paste and the straw sticking out of it. She sits beside Lia and passes her a credit chit. Lia scans it, and her eyes widen: it’s three times as much as the one the volus accused her of stealing.

“I can’t accept this,” Lia says, though she desperately wants to. It’s enough to get her a decent bed and food for a few months, or be a good down payment on the ship she wants. But the quarian must need it, too.

“Yes, you can,” she says, and closes Lia’s hand around it. “Do good with it,” she says, and then stands up. “ _Keelah’selai_ , Lia’Vael nar Ulnay.”

She looks up. “ _Keelah’selai_ …” she realizes she doesn’t know the quarian’s name.

“Tali’Zorah vas Neema,” she says. And then, with a slight nod, she leaves.

Lia blinks long after Tali has disappeared from her view. _That was Tali’Zorah_. 

She doesn’t buy the ship. She looks all day, but with a full stomach – full for the first time since she was stranded on the Citadel – she goes back to the shelter that evening, and asks what she can do to help.

[[MORE]]

**vali’gorel nar qwib qwib**

Illium is beautiful. 

That’s an understatement. Illium is _gorgeous_. It’s shining and shimmering, it’s glittering and dangerous, everything the Fleet is not. 

It’s not that she doesn’t love her family or her people, she does. But Val’s always wanted more. More than life in space, more than trying to keep aging ships running, more than the life she grew up with. 

And Illium is _perfect_. Nos Astra is perfect. __

She’s had no shortage of work, either. Quarians aren’t noticed as much on Illium as they are elsewhere in the galaxy, and so she doesn’t stand out. She can go almost everywhere and melt into the crowd and shadows. She spent all last week in the diamond district, taking small black bags from back doors and delivering them around Nos Astra on a stolen skybike.

It’s shady work, she has no delusions of that. The people who hire her are the very people she was warned about, but they pay well enough that she has an apartment a few streets into a decent neighborhood. She doesn’t even need roommates to help with the rent. 

It’s shady work for shady people, but it’s fun work. Val’s never felt so alive, so light and free, as she does when she’s boosting a skycar or carrying two million credits’ worth of jewels to a drop point. 

The only downside is having to pretend to be interested in other people for the sake of a job. She’s a thief and a courier, not a grifter. There’s no thrill in it for her; the thrill is in the steal, the thrill is in the rush of maybe getting caught. The thrill is _not_ in talking to the people she’s going to steal from. She has a tactical cloak for a reason.

But this particular job is a matter of timing, and she’s afraid to tell her employer _no_ for fear that he’ll stop calling, and so she’s here, in Eternity, on a date with the most boring turian she’s ever met. Five minutes into the date and he’s already falling for her, but she can’t even remember his name. He works security for the mark, and she needs his garage access codes.

Val decides to string him along, see how long she can play him and what else she can draw out of him. He’s bound to have more than just access codes. She pretends like she isn’t interested – not much of an act – and gives him just enough that he doesn’t give up and call an end to the date.

She leaves the bar with access codes, guard rotations, and schematics for the target safe.

She walks into Nos Astra’s muted, glittery late night air, and sends a message to her employer that she struck gold. The turian calls out after her, and she politely and gently lets him down. Dejectedly, he nods and walks away.

Her omnitool beeps. Instructions – a time and place to meet for the job. The job she wasn’t originally allowed on, but the job she’s now running. She smiles. She’ll never leave this.

**kenn’rala nar tonbay**

He hates Omega. It’s dirty and sleazy, and his environmental seals have been working overtime since he stepped on board the station. He shouldn’t have even stopped here, and he certainly hadn’t planned on it, but he’s always been bad with money and unexpectedly found himself dangerously low on credits in a dangerous area of space. He’s bad with money, but good with salvage, and Omega’s a decent place for salvage.

Kenn barely has the lease settled on his kiosk when a pair of vorcha slink down the stairs, hovering in the shadows. He hasn’t even hacked into the electrical grid yet to power his kiosk. 

“What?” he snaps after trying to ignore the lurking vorcha for a full five minutes. He prides himself on always being polite, but lurking vorcha can’t be a good sign, and he’s been fighting an irrepressible wave of desperation ever since the lease – the cheapest one he could find – was more than what he wanted to pay.

One of the vorcha hisses, wet breath rattling in the back of his throat. “Harrot’s territory,” he growls.

There are other merchant districts, but he’s stuck in this lease for six months. He can’t move, not without breaking his lease and digging himself even deeper. The batarian who rented him the stall looked like the kind who wouldn’t wait around for money, but who would just go straight for a gun to the head.

So Kenn agrees to Harrot’s terms. He doesn’t have a choice. 

The vorcha aren’t even out of sight before he feels failure creep up his spine to join the desperation. He’ll never make enough to get off the station.

Weeks later, a human comes by. He tries not to sound too disappointed, too resigned to his fate when she asks about it: she looks like she might buy something, and no one buys from sad vendors. She even gets Harrot to drop his clutches, allowing him to charge a reasonable price.

He smiles, for the first time since he stepped aboard Omega. A spark of hope lights up inside of him, trying to beat back the crushing failure. He might actually make enough to leave, might actually make enough to get somewhere he can find something for his pilgrimage.

But Cerberus invades, and he’s just another casualty. A dead body at the bottom of the stairs, his kiosk picked over by scavengers.

**maya’leen nar idenna**

“Cut,” the director calls. “Let’s take lunch.”

Maya drops character and walks away from the set. These lines are ridiculous. _As free as dust on the solar wind_. She rolls her eyes, glad – not for the first time – that she has a mask, and wonders – also not for the first time – who wrote this shit.

“Don’t speak to me unless it’s as Bellicus,” she warns her costar, holding up a hand to stop him from coming any closer and inevitably asking her to sit with him at lunch where he’ll say something borderline offensive. She steps around him and keeps walking toward her trailer.

The director steps in front of her. “Maya, I’m just looking for _more_ ,” he gestures to his face. “You have to act _through_ the mask. We don’t have your face, so it’s up to your _body_ and _voice_ to tell us what Shalei is thinking.”

 _Shalei is thinking that she would never say half the things in this mess of a script_. “Okay,” she says cheerily. “I’ll work on that after lunch.”

She miraculously makes it the rest of the way to her trailer without encountering any other cast or crew. With a sigh, she locks the door behind her and drops onto the couch. The work is nice, and the money is even nicer, but the script is _awful_ , her costar keeps hitting on her, and with the way that they’re already plastering ads all over the Citadel when filming hasn’t even finished yet – she’s never going to escape this character. Ever.

Maya makes herself a smoothie and sits in the quiet of her trailer for a bit. Shalei is her first role of any decent size, the first time she’s been pulled out of crowd scenes and background extras. She wishes there’d been something in the middle – something just on the edge of the spotlight, instead of being thrust straight into it. Then she’d have something else to rely on, something to point to when casting agents inevitably ask her about Shalei. 

The set bell rings – two-minute warning – and she sighs. She slurps the rest of her smoothie, takes three deep breaths, and opens the door. If she’s going to be Shalei for the rest of her life, she might as well be good at it. She’ll take her mask off, she’ll sing, she’ll deliver the most ridiculously absurd lines.

Even if it means never getting another role in her life, convincingly selling Shalei means she’ll never have to worry about money. Which means she can stay on the Citadel, and doesn’t have to go back to the Fleet, where she’s just another quarian.

“Annnnnnnnnnnnnnd _action!_ ”

She gazes up at him – seeing only Bellicus, and not the turian who’s been mildly annoying her since filming started – and tries to feel, with her entire body, that she loves this man. Her shoulders relax and she leans a little bit toward him, just enough that their fingers brush against each other.

“Tonight, I’m as free as the dust on the solar wind,” she whispers, letting her gaze linger on him.

“Yes, _perfect!_ ” the director yells. “Cut and print that. Maya, that was _beautiful_ , keep it up through the rest of the scene.”

She turns and looks over her shoulder. “Of course.”

**tali’zorah vas normandy**

_Bosh’tets_ , all of them. 

She helped save the galaxy, brought back information that would help them fight the geth, went to Haestrom and nearly burned up for research they wouldn’t even look at, and the Admiralty Board decided to put her on trial for treason.

They accepted her back, even made her an admiral, and yet they didn’t listen to her – they decided to go to war with the geth instead. They made her an admiral _because_ of the geth, and then didn’t listen to her about the geth. _Bosh’tet_ isn’t a strong enough word.

Tali listens to Admiral Gerrel and Admiral Raan argue, and watches Admiral Xen stare at Legion like it’s one of her soulless experiments, and wonders why she even tries. Wonders why she even bothers to come back to the Fleet when all she’s ever gotten out of it is heartache and frustration. She loves her people, but it’s hard to see the rest of the Fleet through the stupidity of the admirals.

And then Shepard pings her omnitool with a departure time, and Tali swallows.

 _This_ is why she keeps returning. 

She can hardly believe it, not even when they shuttle lands. _Rannoch_.

By the homeworld you may see some day…by the homeworld she’s lucky enough to see _right now_. The homeworld she is _standing on_. She’s breathing Rannoch’s air, tasting Rannoch’s dust through her filtration seals, feeling Rannoch’s rocks underneath her feet. Rannoch’s sun warms her through her suit, and she tilts her face up to the sky.

Shepard gives her a rock, a small round orange pebble, and Tali closes her hand around it. She smiles at Shepard, and slips the pebble into her pocket. It’s only a tiny bit of the homeworld to take with her, but it’s more than many will ever get. 

A small lizard runs across the rocky sand in front of her.

“When you’re ready,” Shepard says, and heads back to the shuttle.

Tali takes a moment, lagging a little behind. All purples and pinks and oranges, she wants to remember Rannoch’s sky, and the way the scraggly trees cling to the rocks with so much life, and the quiet lap of the ocean below the cliffs. The water sparkles in the sun, and even the shadows are warm and welcoming. Beachfront property, indeed. 

She smiles. With a deep breath, she turns back to the shuttle, to Shepard and Legion, to giving the Migrant Fleet their homeworld again, and a place to put down roots.


End file.
